There is no simple answer. Its is almost entirely dependent on implementation. All systems are vulnerable to things like supply chain attacks. We put a lot of trust in phone vendors, telcos and Google.

If you are going to compare to something like termux you need to compare with an equivalent sandboxed environment on regular linux, like a docker/podman container with appropriate permissions. As far as I know they use the same linux kernel features like cgroups and namespaces under the hood.

Traditionally Linux desktop apps run with the full permissions of the user and the X window system lets apps spy on each other which is less secure than Android sandboxing by design. There have been attempts to do better (eg flatpak/flatseal, wayland) but they are optional.

Having comprehensive unicode language coverage on a free OS is amazing. I wish the font system was smart enough to hide Noto variants in creative apps but leave them available for browsers. There is a workaround to do that but its a huge pain. I wouldn’t delete any files managed by the package system. They will just keep coming back anyway. There are smaller collections of noto fonts in AUR that will satisfy the noto-fonts dependency which should keep KDE Plasma happy. They should be a straight swap if you are comfortable with an AUR dependency for a functioning desktop. The newer one is noto-fonts-main updated this year or there is an older noto-fonts-lite. Not tried either. Usual stuff about backups and taking advice from strangers on the internet.

Segoe might benefit more from the embedded bitmap or autohint settings than the regular open source fonts I am likely to use. Microsoft would optimise the hell out of it to take advantage of their proprietary, patented font rendering system. I wouldn’t be surprised if it rendered poorly with distro defaults. Its the kind of blind spot a lot of open source devs and packagers could easily have. Its probably packed full of embedded bitmaps for small sizes and proprietary hinting stuff that linux won’t understand.

I don’t doubt you. Linux font rendering has been good enough for so long now that its surprising when people say its worse than some other system but I think it is still a reasonably common complaint so there has to be something to it. A lot of distros probably don’t have a very good font selection installed out of the box compared with proprietary systems and I am sure that plays a role.

My desktop has a 38" ultrawide and the pixel density is a lot lower than your dual 4k monitors so I want to do everything I can for font rendering and your post has got me asking questions. I am in the process of configuring a minimal, low distraction tiling wm setup for a bit of fun (also another nvim conf spring clean). I hadn’t considered changing the font rendering defaults.

I think I have all the fonts you list installed except for Hack. Inter is also a good one for UI. I don’t use Fira Code anymore for code/terminal but I keep it around. It is a nice code font with ligature support but it didn’t have an Italic variant and I like subtle use of italics in code and docs. Currently using Iosevka for mono but next week it might be something different.

This post is fascinating. Most distros have good defaults for font rendering now and I haven’t used hacks like infinality to fix font rendering on Linux for years. That project doesn’t even exist anymore. I would be really interested to know which setting made the difference for OP and why.

I am writing this on a little HiDPI laptop with over 200dpi and to be honest hinting and sub-pixel rendering are invisible to my eyes on this device. Apple dropped sub-pixel rendering ages ago when all their products moved to retina displays. But its still really useful on low dpi displays and I thought it generally worked well enough out of the box.

A file almost identical to the local.conf has been posted to forums in the past but back then fontconfig often shipped with outdated defaults. My distro defaults have aliasing, slight hinting and sub-pixel rgb enabled out of the box.

Arch has these defaults. Bookworm lacks the sub-pixel-rgb (its just a link away) but my guess is Ubuntu derivatives probably include it:

• 10-hinting-slight.conf
• 10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf
• 10-yes-antialias.conf
• 11-lcdfilter-default.conf

The differences I see are the last 3 options in local.conf:

• disabling embedded bitmaps. I think this would change rendering for old MS Office fonts. And perhaps break some emoji fonts. I have Noto Color Emoji but I don’t have any old MS fonts. This seems like it would have limited impact.
• enabling autohinting. If you have slight hinting enabled and the font contains hinting information it should automatically use it. So I thought it made no difference if you have good fonts installed. I might be wrong. But again if you use good fonts I am not sure this has an impact.
• setting font weight to medium. This is an odd one. Does this mean that every font query returns a medium weight or that if you don’t give a weight you get medium? Fattening up thin fonts might be a user preference but you can also select desired font weights in your desktop settings and apps.

Fontconfig is a compiled database for font queries, it doesn’t do rendering. Whatever you put in fontconfig, an app like kitty will not implement sub-pixel rgba rendering for performance and implementation reasons but many other terminals will. I think gtk4 might be heading the same way. Depending on variations in colour vision and displays people tend to disagree on the value of sub-pixel rgb but it looks like it is a common distro default anyway.

The local.conf file should work on any distro. It’s an opinionated override and might not be ideal for everyone but you can use the settings as a starting point to research further. Don’t modify the other files in /etc/fonts as they will be updated by the distro. Claude’s other suggestions apart from selecting some better fonts generally do nothing as far as I can tell. I connected to one of my debian machines and the symbolic links Claude gave to /etc/conf.avail are a debianism as I suspected. If you don’t install or use bitmap fonts and you override the rgb aliasing in local.conf I don’t see the point of either of those symbolic links but whatever meatbag wrote them in a stackoverflow or reddit post intended them for a debian distro.

Freetype2, fontconfig and cairo are going to be pulled in as dependencies when you install just about any desktop app/library eg firefox, gtk so this is a no-op. Same for installing the jre and fontconfig again. Its pointless. The freetype2.sh line is commented out because that has been the default setting for the last 8 years so it makes no difference. The gfx.webrender.all setting in firefox is an override to force something it is most likely already doing based on the detected environment. If you check about:support the chances are you are already using hardware rendering. And its a performance and not quality setting. Half of this makes no sense.

Installing nicer fonts is always a good idea and also setting your desktop and application default fonts.

Some of the local.conf settings could potentially makes a big difference if your desktop environment defaults/user settings aren’t good. Don’t know a huge amount about freetype settings but I suspect using assign in there might override desktop environment settings which some people might not want. I set mine in a gui like the monkey I am.

My conversation with any llm tends to go, “you got a, b, c wrong, it should be d, e and f” and it says “sorry, ofcourse it should be d, e and f, my mistake, here it is with d, e, f, g and h”. Then I say “g and h are wrong it should be i and j”. And it keeps going. In the end I write it myself. Huge time wasters.

Edit: didn’t pick up on it immediately but the two symbolic link commands are suss (they are for debian based distros). Endeavor is arch based and fontconfig on arch has the configs in /usr/share/fontconfig and the ones in the conf.default directory should already be linked into /etc/fonts/conf.d. 10-sub-pixel-rgb is in /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default so that is already linked for me so attempting to do another link without deleting it would be an error - another no-op. I don’t like rgb sub-pixel rendering so its overridden in my desktop settings. It shouldn’t be necessary on high dpi IMO. The proper path for 70-no-bitmaps is in the /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail directory if you want to link it properly. If you use the wrong path as Claude suggested, its another no-op. If, like me, you don’t have any bitmap fonts installed it won’t make any difference anyway. Also /etc/fonts/conf.d is created by the fontconfig package so that is another no-op.

Edit 2: The setting’s name might be inaccurate but Cleartype is the name of Microsoft’s proprietary font renderer and isn’t available on Linux. So possibly gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode was picked up from some StackOverflow discussion about Firefox font rendering on Windows. I won’t say it doesn’t work without reading the Firefox source code and/or trying it but I suspect a setting with that name would not have any effect on Mac or Linux.

I followed the directions and it worked. No issues and no regret.

The biggest similarity with Windows is that it isn’t a community run project. In my opinion they tried very to represent themselves as an open source community in the early days and downplay Canonical’s role. There is nothing wrong with Ubuntu as a first introduction to Linux but if people are looking for a project to join and make contributions then there are many better options.

Proton is a patched Wine with a translation layer from DirectX to Vulkan. Wine will run a lot of Windows cad software with varying success, particularly older versions and I am not sure how much general desktop applications benefit from the Valve sponsored improvements to gaming. It is a shame these CAD programs weren’t all built on game engines like Unity or Unreal instead of a bunch of Windows APIs with varied levels of implementation.

Evolution currently. Previously Thunderbird. I wouldn’t mind a newer client but I am only interested in native apps talking to my email server over open standards.

Adding rust to a massive mature C project that targets lots of architectures and has many contributors is a difficult process. If it succeeds it is going to take a lot more time and patience.

You want the most common things available in a Settings app(s) as they generally are on Gnome, KDE, Windows and Mac. If we cram too much stuff in there regular people struggle. Finding a good balance is a dilemma for most platforms. You want the less obvious stuff to be available in additional specialist “tweak” apps for more experienced users as they often are on all these platforms but sometimes less so on Linux. Then the really esoteric stuff you have to edit registry settings, conf files and plists as you do on all of them. Linux tends to provide more power and flexibility but requires reading documentation due to the diversity of config methods and locations.

A Mac user very sensibly contacted me worried about pasting a command to edit a plist into the terminal from a website they found trying to fix an issue. Nobody should be pasting commands they don’t understand into terminals. A quick search and I found the GUI toggle to do the same thing. It isn’t exclusively a Linux issue. Windows and Mac have complex operating systems underneath and equivalently powerful command line tools.

GUI config isn’t practical for hardcore linux users. It isn’t scriptable, we can’t store it in version control, it is harder to document, it is harder to use remotely. We have to appreciate that we have a growing number of users where it is worth taking a bit more time and sharing an alternative if one exists. However nobody wants to configure services in a GUI as we want to version, document and distribute this stuff and managing services in a GUI is unprofessional because you lose these things.

Reviewers like Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed serve the Windows gamer market first. If you game on Windows you want to know the best price/performance for your purposes. Benchmarking kernel compiles and database transactions on Linux has zero relevance to a Windows gamer, particularly if Microsoft bugs cause the performance not to translate.

If we only looked at raw hardware performance and ignored platform support we might evaluate Nvidia only on Windows and determine they are the best graphics cards for Linux users which would be insane. Platform support matters to an audience.

I purchased in December 2022. I have not needed to buy any replacement parts but availability appears good.

At the same time I bought one of my kids the cheapest MSI laptop I could find for school. I just learned some of the keys on the MSI have been working intermittently. I have no idea what to do with it. We didn’t value a laptop for running Microsoft Word very highly and spent the savings on linux desktop upgrades. I can’t say it was the wrong choice. With the Framework it is trivial to check the connector or order a replacement but there was a substantial price difference.

Out of selfishness I would like people to keep buying Framework so they keep their replacement parts stocked but blind brand loyalty is stupid. People don’t need remuneration to engage in a hobby but if they are working for a company then unpaid labour is generally an abuse.

I have a Framework 13" DIY running Linux. It is functional. I am reasonably confident I will be able to buy replacements for anything that breaks which is important to me. It is well designed for repair and upgrade but other devices offer better price/performance/features. If you are on a tight budget and care about the environment buy used.

Windows usage isn’t the cause of dysfunction in corporate IT but a symptom of it. All you would get is badly managed Linux systems compromised by bloated insecure commercial security/management software.

I isn’t even a Linux vs Windows thing but a competent at your job vs don’t know what the fuck you are doing thing. Critical systems are immutable and isolated or as close as reasonably possible. They don’t do live updates of third party software and certainly not software that is running privileged and can crash the operating system.

I couldn’t face working in corporate IT with this sort of bullshit going on.

Same here. Ext4 is an excellent general purpose file systems and a sensible default. It lacks features that are useful, even critical, for some use cases which sometimes rules it out but it certainly isn’t obsolete.

The social aspect might be underappreciated. My guess is people are mainly introduced by family and friends and it becomes a big part of their identity. It becomes difficult to separate the individual elements.

I like silent laptops but sometimes I want to max out the power budget and get work done without worrying about thermal throttling. Having a fan and customizable power settings gives users a choice. Apple takes that choice away.